Breaking news: 2017 IJA Fest to have free brunch all week for attendees

Video Tutorial Contest open during November

Roger Dollarhide selling some old juggling books

IJA Honorary Awards nominations open

IJA video archive

eNewsletter content

IJA Regional Competitions – South America

Latest articles in eJuggle

Upcoming juggling festivals

Chair’s message, by Nathan Wakefield

We’ve got a lot of great things going at the IJA with our programs right now.

The IRC program continues to take off at a rapid speed. In fact, as I write this, IJA IRC Coordinator Erin Stephens is in Colombia for the Bogotá IRC. This event has one of the highest number of competitor entrants yet! We are excited to coordinate these regional competitions and are looking forward to the future of this program. To get a glance at some of the action that takes place at an IRC, check out our recently released IRC South America 2015 highlights video.

Our Youth Juggling Academy program continues to evolve. Galen Harp from The Institute of Jugglology (2014 IJA Teams Champions) was just approved as our new YJA Program Coordinator. Galen has been an active part of the YJA for years along with his juggling partner Ellen Winters, who is stepping down from the Coordinator position. There is already talk about diversifying the program further and expanding in new directions. Be on the lookout for more juggling educational news in the coming months.

Speaking of education, after taking a year off, we are pleased to announce that we are bringing back the IJA Video Tutorial Contest! Program Director Thom Wall has been hard at work organizing the 2016 VTC over the last few months, and we have some great prize packages lined up! Check out the official VTC contest page for rules, prizes and submission guidelines; and follow the Facebook event page for discussion on the contest as it unfolds. The action kicks off November 1st and entries are accepted through November 30th, so dust off your teaching caps and start planning now!

In other news, we are currently accepting nominations for the 2017 Honorary IJA Awards. If you have someone (or sometwos or somethrees) in mind that you feel would be nicely suited for one of our awards, drop the Awards Committee a line at awards@juggle.org and let them know who you would like to be considered and why.

Seeing great things on the horizon,

Nathan Wakefield IJA Chairman

Breaking news: 2017 IJA Fest to have free brunch all week for attendees

We have just received confirmation from our anonymous donor iiWii that we will again have a free brunch all week for attendees of the 2017 IJA Festival in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, July 10-16, 2017. The free brunch was very popular this year in El Paso. It saved not only money but time and it gave people an opportunity to sit down for the meal with other jugglers and to make new friends. Look for more info on the 2017 IJA fest over the next few months. Preliminary information is available now on the IJA festival page, which will be updated as new details are available.

Video Tutorial Contest open during November

The Video Tutorial Contest is an online educational throwdown open to jugglers, object manipulators, flow artists and physical performers across all disciplines. A panel of expert judges evaluates all entries and scores them according to their educational, production and entertainment values.

The top ten videos will be awarded prize packages, each containing lots of good prizes donated by vendors from all over the juggling community. First place includes an IJA Festival Package, among other prizes. Some additional categories are added from year to year to mix things up!

Entries to the 2016 contest will be accepted from November 1st through November 30th, 2016. Winners will be announced on or around December 8th, 2016. For more details and to enter the contest, please see the Video Tutorial Contest page.

IJA Video Tutorial Contest Rules in Brief

– You do NOT need to be an IJA member to participate in this event. – Ten winners will be selected by the judges. – All videos must mention the “IJA Video Tutorial Contest” in text, audio, or video. If using text or video, this must be on screen for a minimum of three (3) seconds. YouTube annotations are not sufficient to meet this requirement. – All areas of object manipulation are permitted. – The IJA reserves the right to disqualify videos that do not meet official rule criteria. – You may not use copyrighted music in your video. – You may submit as many videos as you like. Creating one good video, however, would give you better odds of winning than creating three mediocre videos. – Videos must be submitted by the 11:59pm, Pacific Time on the last day of the submission month (November, this year).

Long time IJA photographer Roger Dollarhide is downsizing and would like to see a few old juggling books (and other items) get into good hands. They’re “for sale cheap”, he says. Contact him at rogerdollarhide@comcast.net if you’re interested in any or all of his items listed below. He says: “All are in good to excellent condition. Total weight is 4.5 lbs. Actual value unknown. Reasonable offer accepted.”

IJA video archive … and music copyrights, by Don LewisFor years now, the IJA has captured on video the highlights of the annual IJA festival. Initially this was done on various formats of analog videotape. More recently the recordings have been digital. In an effort to preserve this precious archive of the competitions and special festival moments, the IJA is digitizing most of the content onto disk.

This should be a phenomenal resource. Unfortunately there is an issue with the use of music in the videos that keeps us from making these historical videos available to members. Copyright laws and regulations have evolved significantly since the dawn of digital distribution formats. We respect that, of course, while still seeking legal ways to make archival juggling material available to members.

Competition routines almost always use music. That isn’t a problem in the gym or theatre because the IJA or the venue buys licenses that cover the right to play music during the week. The fees that we pay go into a general copyright fund and are quite reasonable. As you are sitting in your seat in the theatre, you are legally hearing music that the IJA has a permit to play.

The problem arises when one wants to reproduce copyrighted music and distribute it in a different format like in a video. The music that you legally heard in the theatre during the competition may represent a copyright violation if you watch a replay anywhere else after the event. The RIAA aggressively prosecutes violations of their copyrights. It does not matter that the music is just background to the juggling performance to the RIAA. If we were to put our video assets online, we might be considered to be distributing copyrighted music without a license.

The copyright issue has been less of a problem for us recently since we have been encouraging competitors to use royalty free – public domain music. Other organizations have simply given up trying to maintain a video archive on the assumption that the RIAA issues will always be insurmountable.

A casual inquiry many years ago suggested that the cost of video reproduction rights for a small number of DVDs would be on the order of $5000 per tune. An astonishing cost that we could never hope to pay.

Copyright law has been much under discussion in recent years. The RIAA has aggressively defended their turf in some aspects. And yet, in some circumstances there are videos on YouTube with apparent copyright music that manages to stay online. YouTube is pretty quick to take down videos that violate copyrights, so how is some stuff staying online?

If there are any members out there that have current expertise in intellectual property rights, or have access to someone who does, we would like to hear ideas about how we could legally make some of our older video archives available.

eNewsletter content

This newsletter is sent out eleven times a year to IJA members. We use it to let you know about things that are happening at the IJA in a timely manner.

It also regularly includes links to articles published in the IJA’s ezine eJuggle, a listing of upcoming juggling events/festivals and important information about the next IJA festival. While the newsletter is only sent to IJA members, you may forward it to other interested people, such as members of your local juggling club. We do not try to maintain a separate list of non-members who would like to receive the newsletter. Interested non-members may download a copy from the IJA website. We do not send the newsletter out widely and indiscriminately because we do not want to be thought of as spamming people.

If there is some juggling related activity that you would like other jugglers to know about, please submit an article. Articles received by the middle of the month generally are included in the issue that is sent out towards the end of the month.

We are excited to announce the medalists of the IRC Sudamerica 2016 Bogotá:

Gold: Erick Israel Frutos of Ecuador

Silver: Anderson Pereira da Silva of Brazil

Bronze: Geison Andres Estupinan of Colombia

This event took place October 29 at SOFA, a massive Comicon/Urban Art festival, in Bogota, Colombia – in collaboration with the Colombian Circus Convention. 17 people entered the preliminaries, and 10 finalists were selected by the prelims judges: Jay Gilligan, Ori Roth and Brenm Corso. It was an amazing lineup of some of the best juggling talent in South America.

IRC South America 2016 Santiago: November 6, 2016

The IJA is excited to be partnering with Organic Juggling to host a second IRC in Santiago, Chile. Organic Juggling hosts mo(nthly “Encuentros de Malabarismo”, or juggling meetings, which attract upwards of 1,000 juggle each month. The IRC will be in combination with the 32 Encuentro on November 5-6. It will be a 2-day event featuring workshops, shows, games, and of course, the IJA Regional Competition. Check out our informative webpage (in Spanish) at: www.juggle.org/irc/sudamerica2016santiago

We are excited to see how these events go. Stay tuned to the IJA Facebook and Instagram pages for updates on the finalists and for videos highlighting the competitions both during and after the events.

Latest articles in eJuggle

Mikhail Rudenko, Inventor of Russian BallsMikhail (Michael) Kuzmich Rudenko (rus.: Михаил Кузмич Руденко) is the Ukrainian juggler who invented the semi-filled juggling stage balls that became known as Russian balls. He is a great juggler, who when he was young, practiced very hard with no mercy on himself. He has been an inspiration to many other jugglers, but has never been acknowledged […]

The Rudenko BrothersThe Rudenko Brothers were one of the top juggling duos of the middle of the twentieth century. Their career started in the 1930s and ended in the 1970s. Igor and George Rudenko started out as a silent act doing tempo / flash / technical juggling in the style of Rastelli, but transitioned over time to […]

IRC South America 2015 Highlights VideoThe 2015 IJA Regional Competition – South America, was hosted by La Conve Pie Derecho in Lima, Peru. The event was part of a three day circus convention held at Lima’s Cultural Ministry in the heart of the city. Not only was the Cultural Ministry supportive for the event, but the media of the city […]

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EJC 2016 ReviewEJC 2016 was in Almere, the Netherlands from July 30-August 7. I managed to arrive in Amsterdam a day early, so after I settled into my hostel, I strolled around Nieuwmarkt and Dam square. The city is certainly like the stereotypes: cannabis wafting through the streets, drug-related gifts and paraphernalia in all the tourist shops, […]

Juggling Rings: Their History, Development, and Innovation – Part 2In Part 1 of this series, I discussed the history and development of juggling rings. In this second half of the discussion, we’ll focus on various innovative, functional, and novelty rings. Innovative and Functional Rings Ernest Montego was the first juggler I’m aware of to put “edge bumpers” on his rings to make them easier […]

Scott Cain – Updates on Previous eJuggle ArticlesFor this month’s article, I thought I would do some follow-ups on my previous twenty articles. I’ve been writing for eJuggle for just over a year and a half now. I (usually) enjoy hearing from readers on my articles, some of which ask specifically for feedback, ideas, or assistance. In some cases, I actually go […]

Juggling Rings: Their History, Development, and Innovation – Part 1In 2014, I wrote a five part series on the history and development of the juggling club. As readers of that series found, there are a myriad of ways that clubs have been made over the past 150 years. There are hundreds of variations of types of clubs. While this type of wide variation doesn’t […]

Kurios – a review“Kurios – Cabinet of Curiosities,” a new Cirque du Soleil production written and directed by Michel Laprise premiered in Montreal on April 24th 2014. It is currently playing in New York City (on Randell’s Island), and will proceed on November 27th to Miami, Dallas, Houston, Winnipeg, Portland, and Vancouver; then on to Central and South America, […]

A Message from The Chairman, September 2016It’s easy to get caught up in the anticipation of a festival when so many exciting plans are being put into place. However, occasionally unexpected circumstances arise that make you take a look at the bigger picture. In 2017, our annual festival will take place in Cedar Rapids, IA. This week, Cedar Rapids has been […]

Juggler’s Scoop – September, 2016 Juggler’s Scoop is a monthly collection of the latest juggling videos and news bits from around the web. Here’s the latest scoop! – The Passing Zone and Viktor Kee both had strong showings on America’s Got Talent. – Lucas Adverse traps n’ rolls after one year of juggling. – Josh Horton teams up with Jason […]

Chinko – The Clever Boy JugglerChinko was born Thomas Cromwell–Knox in England in 1880. His entire family was involved in show business. He started out performing a juggling act called The Cromwells with his brother, Teddy, who went on to become a famous comedian. When Thomas started as a solo act, he took on the stage name Chinko as a […]

Upcoming juggling festivals

For a list of even more festivals, check the worldwide juggling event listings on our website at: www.juggle.org/events.

If you’re organizing a juggling festival (or if you simply know of a juggling fest) and you want to advertise it in the IJA eNewsletter, just drop a note to eNewsletter editor Don Lewis ijanews@juggle.org. Such listings are free.

The eNewsletter comes out near the end of each month. Your festival can be listed for a few months, and you don’t have to be an IJA affiliate to have a fest listed. Hey, jugglers want to know about juggling fests. Help them out and get more jugglers to your fest at the same time.